Texture Theory
polycounter lvl 4
Hey,
I'm very interested in learning more about texture theory. Does anyone have any good sources? I am interested in practice and how to follow a correct workflow, however I would like to investigate more of the theory behind textures. Thanks for any help.
I'm very interested in learning more about texture theory. Does anyone have any good sources? I am interested in practice and how to follow a correct workflow, however I would like to investigate more of the theory behind textures. Thanks for any help.
Replies
I also wrote an older tutorial on texture theory and similar layering/material concepts, including baking RGB selection mask, setting up base materials, etc: http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/materials Some of the texture values in that one are old/not very correct but the basic principal is sound. These are both Marmoset Toolbag specific tutorials but they're written in such a way that they should be generally applicable to most engines/pipelines.
Do you see any limitations of the PBR materials or any cases it's not suitable or too difficult to go for a PBR material?
If you're using the metalness workflow, there are a couple limitations. You don't get as much control over the reflectivity of non-metals, everything is fixed to 0.04 while in reality non-metals reflect in the 0.02-0.08 range or so.
Also with the metalness workflow, you can get some nasty edge artifacts when blending from a metallic surface to a non-metal.
But thats really it in terms of limitations. If you've got a full-color specular map input, the workflow is actually very, very similar to last gen techniques. Much of what is different about the PBR workflow is simply that with stricter guidelines and more information for artists on appropriate material values, are content should be more straight forward to create and result in more consistant art that works better in different lighting, which is basically universally better than the old method of eyeballing everything and tweaking it later to make sure it works.
The only situation where you would really want to avoid working with pbr techniques is if you're on really old hardware that can't do normal maps/image based lighting, so you'll need to paint in all the lighting. Or perhaps if you have an extremely stylized game with a non-photo realistic look, like anime style games.
Really even with stylized games the basic principal of sound and consistent material values applies though.
Hey Earthquake I was wondering what your workflow was exactly, I recall you talking about layering your materials in photoshop with basic values and then using masks to detail them out. Is this all done in photoshop? Is photoshop the best tool for PBR right now? I've been tossing between PS, Substance Designer, Painter, and DDO when something needs to be done fast.
The problem when I do it in photoshop however is that I'm pretty much stumped when I begin, not knowing where to begin is the problem and I worry too much about not giving the attention to the other maps like roughness. PBR at the moment makes total sense to me, especially the metalness/roughness workflow, but the execution hasn't been there.
However, what I actually use is the Quixel Suite/dDo with a bit of manual work in photoshop.
As far as what is best, really you can do the same stuff in PS, dDo, substance, Mari, etc, its all down to personal preference.